A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas,x836-x986TERRY G. JORDAN*N THE CULTURAL AS IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL SENSE, TEXAS HAS ALWAYSbeen a borderland or even a shatterbelt. The Amerindian regionaldiversity of pre-Columbian times, based partially in climatic contrasts,was obliterated, only to be replaced by an even more complex humanmosaic. Those who would understand Texas, now as well as 150 yearsago, must once and for all discard the myth of the typical Texan, achauvinistic notion that, on occasion, has even penetrated the scholarlycommunity,' and accept the concept of a multiethnic society. Texas is aunit only in the functional political sense; culturally it is a balkanizedzone entrapped in an artificial administrative framework.2Texans, in short, inhabit a border province. The state, in commonwith eastern Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and SouthTirol, lies astride a fundamental culturo-linguistic divide between Ro-mance and Germanic civilizations, a divide lent heightened contrasthere by the addition of a large non-European, Amerindian culturalcomponent on the Latin side.In such situations, when an artificial political framework is imposedupon a cultural borderland, ethnic groups are created. Ethnicity im-plies minority status in a larger society dominated numerically, and* Terry G. Jordan, Walter Prescott Webb Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, has pub-lished many articles and books on cultural geography. His recent works include Texas Log Build-ings: A Folk Architecture (1978), Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy (1982), and American LogBuildings: An Old World Heritage (1985).'Evon Z. Vogt, "American Subcultural Continua as Exemplified by the Mormons and Tex-ans," American Anthropologist, LVII (1955), 1,163-1,172; Joseph Leach, The Typical Texan: Biog-raphy of an American Myth (Dallas, 1952).2This is the theme of Terry G. Jordan, John L. Bean, Jr., and William M. Holmes, Texas: AGeography (Boulder, Colo., 1984). See also Terry G. Jordan, "Population Origin Groups inRural Texas," Map Supplement No. 13, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LX(June, 1970), 404-405, plus folded map; Terry G. Jordan, "Population Origins in Texas,1850," Geographical Review, LIX (Jan., 1969), 83-103; and Donald W. Meinig, Imperial Texas:An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin, 1969).